Fifty years ago, the Ontario Provincial Education Committee headed by Emmett Hall and Lloyd Dennis released Living and Learning (1968), one of the most earth-shaking reports in Canadian educational history. It proposed a bold and provocative progressive reform prescription for the perceived ills afflicting the Ontario public school system. While it was initially welcomed by education progressives and the Toronto media, it aroused fierce and determined resistance, mainly voiced by leading academics and high school subject specialists. Many academic teachers considered it a virtual declaration of war on subject disciplines and the knowledge-based high school curriculum. Fifteen years later, the pendulum of pedagogical and curriculum reform was swinging in the other direction.

One of the most strident critics of the Hall-Dennis Report was Dr. James Daly, a little known 36-year-old McMaster University English history and classics professor. After being presented with a copy by History Department Chair, Professor John H. Trueman, Daly started reading the document and could not believe his eyes. “You ought to see this. It’s everything we might have feared!, ” he told Trueman, and needs to be exposed as dangerous educational thinking. It was that brief encounter that gave rise to Dr. James Daly’s little pamphlet, Education or Molasses?, a stinging critique of the Hall-Dennis Report, and a resistance movement determined to expose the fallacies of its unabashed “child-centred philosophy” and to rid the educational world of its deleterious influence.

As a former Ontario secondary school teacher and a classicist, Dr. Daly saw the Report as a dangerous utopian panacea and “an assault on civilization as we know it.” For Daly, the campaign against the Report amounted to a modern-day crusade in defence of a knowledge-centred curriculum aimed at resisting “the supine acceptance of fashionable piffle.”While Daly’s little book echoed the essential message of Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind (1953), it never attracted the same popular acclaim. Many Canadian educators from regular classroom teachers to academics sympathized with Daly, but few rallied to his defence in the ensuing public debate.

The standard history of Ontario’s modern educational system, R.D. Gidney’s From Hope to Harris,offers a compelling re-interpretation of the Hall-Dennis Report and its legacy, recognizing the profound influence of the Department’s eminence gris,Jack McCarthy, and cutting Lloyd Dennis down to proper size. When it came to discussing the “dissenting voices,” Gidney consigned them to a mere footnote. While describing Daly’s little book as “one scintillating and scathing jeremiad” that was “not to be missed,” he wrote him completely out of the public debate.

Leading education progressives tend to have a blind spot when it comes to considering the Hall-Dennis movement in the round. Canadian history specialist Ken Osborne is a case in point. His 1999 historical primer entitled Education: A Guide to the Canadian Debate ignores Daly’s critique, even though it found tremendous support among Ontario secondary school teachers. Indeed, Osborne looked back wistfully on the Report as “the shining star of educational reform” and, without referencing Daly, bemoaned those who “painted” progressivism as “at best woolly-minded idealism and at worst reckless irresponsibility.”

Daly was not alone in raising such strenuous objections to the Report’s progressive philosophy and program. Within a week of the Report’s release, three senior university academics had written scathing Letters to the Editor, each published in The Globe and Mail: Chairman of York University’s Physics Department, R.W. Nicholls, economics professor Ralph Blackmore of Waterloo Lutheran University, and Professor D.J. Dooley of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. Each of them registered strong objections to “the apparent naivete” of many of the recommendations, questioned “removing the structure from the school system,” warned about school years being “squandered on trivialities and fads”; and the “watering down of standards” and “elimination of grades.”

Daly’s pamphlet flew in the face of the Hall-Dennis Report’s promotional campaign. From the time of its release until June 1969, Co-Chair Lloyd Dennis embarked on a “road show” to promote the Hall-Dennis Report and its recommendations. His zealous, super-charged message capitalized upon the initial favourable reviews and buoyed the spirits of educational progressives across Ontario and in every other province and territory. Hired by the Department under contract, he delivered a folksy, entertaining talk and gave “285 speeches in 180 working days” over nine months promoting the Report.

With this active promotion, the glossy Report became a bestseller with 60,000 copies either sold or in print. It was deemed required reading in all of Ontario’s teachers’ colleges and education faculties. One year after its release, The Toronto Daily Star reported that Committee members had given over 600 speeches reaching live audiences approaching 250,000 persons; in addition, some 100 conferences had been held and special committee were at work in almost every Ontario school system

The periodic murmurs of misgiving began to turn into signs of protest, in spite of Lloyd Dennis’s strenuous missionary efforts. . Many Ontario teachers felt threatened by the call for a fundamental change in methods and even potential allies, such as Toronto’s George Martell of This Magazine is About Schools,found fault with the supposedly “liberalizing” education manifesto. To Martell and more radical progressives, the emphasis on “individualized” learning was seen as corporatist idea threatening to undermine the “sense of community” in public schools

School trustees, departmental officials and even Education Minister William Davis became irritated by Dennis’s unrelenting attack upon the existing system as rigid and stultifying for students. After nine months, his contract was not extended, and he was told that there was no job for him in the Department. At age 44, he found refuge as a Director of Education in Leeds Grenville County Board, a frontier regional board with 50 scattered schools and only 1 psychologist serving 17,000 students.

One of the largest conferences held on the Hall-Dennis Report, “Re-Thinking Education,” held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) on April 17-19, 1969, proved to be a major letdown for Dennis and his allies. Education Minister Davis opened the Conference by distancing himself and the Department from the Report. The final Conference report, prepared by James M. Paton, concluded that “No longer will it be regarded as Holy Writ, the pure Milk of the Word….” The Hall-Dennis document, Paton added, may well have “performed a useful function in stimulating the desire to change by exposing specific weaknesses; but it also raised more questions than it provided answers.”:

Daly’s pamphlet knocked the wind out of the sails of the flagging Hall-Dennis reform movement. His first 500 copies, printed by Cromlech Press in Ancaster, Ontario, sold out in one week. In an influential October 1969 commentary, Toronto Telegram columnists Douglas Fisher and Harry Crowe welcomed Daly’s potent little jeremiad with open arms. After reading the document in mid-1968, they had become, in their own words, “sworn enemies of the report.” Their terse assessment: “We think it windy and dangerous.”

The stinging critique, summarized in the Fisher and Crowe column, was taken up by teachers who took exception to Living and Learning. Many educators saw the Report, in the words of the Telegram columnists, as “a blanket slander of Ontario teachers.” Abandoning structured approaches to learning, giving students a broad menu of course choices, and phasing-out grades and examinations were not popular, especially with seasoned secondary school teachers. Most felt threatened by the rapidity of the changes and saw their ability to control classes gradually slipping away.

Attempting to disassemble the prescribed curriculum provoked genuine outrage. Seeing the Report’s evidence drawn mostly from the early grades, academically-inclined teachers instinctively agreed with Daly that the proposed Hall-Dennis curriculum as a “melange of mush” organized around little more than “general areas of learning.” With the proposed abandonment of prescribed curricula, teachers would be left on their own to design new curricula without any training in the field. Academics and classroom teachers alike claimed that the Report utterly failed to make adequate provision for certain “core subjects,” such as English, Mathematics, and Science, which were essential for an effective, balanced curriculum.

A province-wide “Hall-Dennis PD Day” scheduled by the Ontario Teachers Federation (OTF) for October 8, 1969 planned so elementary and high school teachers could meet to discuss Living and Learning was scuttled by Ontario school boards over the objections of the OTF and Department.

Ontario’s History and Social Studies teachers complained about the proposed curriculum’s presentist bias and seeming acceptance of the assumption that “the present and the future are all that matters.” After viewing the resulting Ontario History Guidelines, John Ricker, Chairman of History at Toronto’s Faculty of Education, confirmed their worst fears, declaring the Hall-Dennis-inspired changes “an invitation for teachers to do their own thing.”

While Daly was writing Education or Molasess?, the Ontario secondary school system was in a state of upheaval. Eight months after the release of Living and Learning, in March 1969, Minister of Education Davis announced a brand new system of organization. The so-called Credit System, first proposed in Circular H.S.1 for 1969-70 and completely adopted in 1972-73, was significantly advanced by means of the Hall-Dennis Report. All of these changes went forward amid the public controversy generated by the Report and Daly’s stinging response.

After some initial flirtations with Hall-Dennis reform, most of the other provinces absorbed the lessons of the bitter divisions aroused by forcing the progressive educational agenda. Education observers in Maritime Canada were totally unmoved by the excitement generated by Living and Learning. In Nova Scotia, Deputy Minister of Education Harold M. Nason remained extremely cautious, even after being prodded by his Ontario counterpart, Jack McCarthy. In May 1971, Maritime educator Russell Hunt put it more bluntly in a review of Satu Repo’s This Book is About Schools. “ The crest of the liberal education reform wave in Ontario was marked by the establishment of OISE… and by the publication of the splashily- produced Hall-Dennis report,” he wrote. That very report, he added, provided a clear sign that “liberal reform of public education was to prove a failure.” Senior academics like John Trueman, a renowned history textbook author, considered the Hall-Dennis report to be “the beginning of the slide” in education standards.

The bloom was completely off the Hall-Dennis rose by June of 1983, fifteen years after its appearance. The Globe and Mailpublished a news feature by Judy Steed entitled “Crisis in the Schools.” West Toronto history teacher and OHASSTA spokesperson John Sheppard told Steed that teachers held the Hall-Dennis Report responsible for “destroying education in Ontario.” The full-page feature story proclaimed the Hall-Dennis era finally over. “Now, it’s the eighties,” Steed stated, “and it’s back to the basics with more structure.”

Why did the 1968 Ontario Hall-Dennis Report inspire such passions? Who supported the campaign for Hall-Dennis-style “student-centred learning”? Why did leading academics and academic high school teachers line up against the Report and its core philosophy? What came out of the furor stirred up by the controversial report?